AI Is Officially Political

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, AI is officially political and how? Before that in the headlines, is OpenClaw the most important software release ever? The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Recall AI, Robots and Pencils, AIUC and Blitzi. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com such AI Daily Brief. If you are interested in sponsoring the show, or really anything else in the AIDB ecosystem, head on over to aidailybrief.ai. While you are there, two things that I want to call your attention to first. Last day to do our February Pulse Survey, appreciate everyone who has done that. This will just take a couple of minutes and it helps us track AI usage and give people data about what's actually going on and what's trending and what's changing. And if you contribute, you get that data before anyone else. And the other last, it's the last day to sign up for this first edition of EnterpriseClaw. You can find that at enterpriseclaw.ai. With that, let's go over to the headlines and some big words from Jensen Huang. We kick off today with a fun little quote from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference from Wednesday. Jensen absolutely waxed about OpenClaw, saying, OpenClaw is probably the single most important release of software probably ever. Linux took some 30 years to reach this level. OpenClaw in, what is it, three weeks, has now surpassed Linux. It is now the single most downloaded open source software in history. Now, what he's specifically referring to is not the idea that overall, OpenClaw has more downloads than Linux or Facebook's React library. What he's referring to is this chart that's flying around, which is true of the GitHub star history of these projects, where OpenClaw is officially ahead of those vaunted projects in GitHub stars, and has done so extremely quickly. Now, hold aside the specific details. The context really matters here. OpenClaw is a phenomenon that has fundamentally changed how people think about what AI can do. It has been ground zero in ushering in the true agent era. And one of the more consequential parts of Jensen's comments is that they came at a Wall Street conference, clearly signaling that personal agents are a big deal and that investors need to get up to speed. This shift in AI is also aligned with Huang's predictions about where the industry is going. For more than a year, Huang has been conceptualizing AI tokens as the new fundamental unit of work in GDP. During his talk, Huang updated this thesis and claimed the so-called token economy is coming into focus. Jensen also discussed NVIDIA's recent $30 billion investment in OpenAI, specifically in the context of it not being the $100 billion deal that was rumored to be in the works last year. He said, I think the opportunity to invest $100 billion in OpenAI is probably not in the cards, not because NVIDIA has gotten any less bullish on the company, but because Jensen's base case is that they IPO by the end of the year, meaning, in his words, this might be the last time we'll have the opportunity to invest in a consequential company like this. Huang added that NVIDIA's $10 billion investment in Anthropic late last year was also probably their last. Which isn't to say that NVIDIA won't continue to benefit from the success of those companies. For example, Jensen commented that Amazon's gigantic compute partnership with OpenAI means that NVIDIA is, quote, ramping AWS like mad. Now, OpenClaw is not just a US phenomenon. In fact, the information recently reported on the many ways OpenClaw is changing what Chinese founders are building. They highlighted a recent OpenClaw hackathon in China, where one contestant made Tinder for AI agents, basically where OpenClaws can find love interests for their humans still. Another created an automated recruiting site where OpenClaws owned by job seekers and companies interview each other. There was also a gamified social media and travel platform that hosts content created by OpenClaws. Felix Tao, the co-founder of Mindverse AI, said, Every founder I know is now working on new projects to test the boundaries of what personal AI agents can do. One of the interesting differences in the Chinese tech scene is the large companies diving straight into the new agentic trend. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent are now all offering hosted OpenClaw instances to customers, something that none of the Western cloud giants have done so far. Kimi Creator, Moonshot and Minimax are also offering cloud-based versions of OpenClaw within their proprietary apps as a way to draw in new users. The article also mentioned numerous startups and founders working on OpenClaw projects, either building features on top of OpenClaw or spinning up competitors in the personal agent space. Qvara's co-founder Dongxi Q said, Tech entrepreneurs in China responded immediately to OpenClaw and launched new projects because they knew all of their competitors would be doing the same. Nobody wants to be left behind. Parker Lyman of Manus even tweeted, This is how competitive it is in China. OpenClaw installers have started offering two hours of house cleaning as part of the package in order to win clients. They'll even list any items you want to de-clutter on a second hand market place. All for 57 bucks. Writes Lenny Rachitsky of Lenny's Podcast, I don't think enough people are appreciating how insane this is. Over 80 OpenClaw meetups scheduled around the world and more popping up every day. For a product less than a few months old, I've never seen anything like this. Something very special is happening. Now moving over to the numbers game. Just one day after Anthropic's revenue numbers were leaked to the press, OpenAI struck back and leaked a larger number. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic had surpassed $19 billion in ARR, more than doubling their run rate since the end of last year. That put them within striking distance of OpenAI, who told investors they had closed 2025 with more than $20 billion in ARR. As soon as I heard that Anthropic was officially at basic parity with the last number that we got from OpenAI, I just knew that we were somehow from some leaker going to get new OpenAI numbers. And sure enough, late last night, the information reported that OpenAI now has exceeded $25 billion in ARR. They also firmed up their 2025 estimate, claiming they actually ended the year with $21.4 billion. That makes that a 17% jump over the first two months of 2026, which if it were not for Anthropic's staggering 36% gain in the last couple of weeks, we'd be talking about with just as much slack in our jaws. Sources added that OpenAI's ARR calculation was based on revenue average over the past four weeks, but if they extrapolated just the past week, ARR would be even higher at $30 billion. Derek Thompson tweeted about all this. AI might still be an industrial bubble because almost every big tech is a bubble of some kind and the revenue has a long way to catch up to capex, but the idea that this industry has no business model is a take aging like a rotted banana. Lastly today, something which I am absolutely going to come back to and do more of an operators-focused episode on at some point, NotebookLM can now create fully animated videos to accompany reports. Google is calling these Cinematic Video Overviews and the results are pretty impressive. The demo showed a brief clip of a video overview about mathematical limits using images and video with some very cool space-themed visualizations. Now we did previously have video overviews, but up until now they'd just been slideshows. They were already a useful extension of audio overviews, but there wasn't as much of a let's say wow factor. The new cinematic video overviews are immediately more striking and pretty much guaranteed to make people wonder how they were made. Specifically, they feel more like a native video presentation with custom animations and images rather than a simple slideshow leveraging stock images. Robert Scoble presented an even more impressive example, sharing a video based on summarizing AI chatter on X over the past few days. The video opens up on an animation of a DaVinci-style contraption as the voiceover discusses how AI discourse has moved on from chatbots to discuss infrastructure, agents, and politics. The video flips through various generated images in a matching style, making the entire presentation feel like a coherent whole. It also draws on real photos where relevant. Scoble said that he analyzed tweets and generated the script externally, but the rest of it was straight from NotebookLM, which also generated an audio podcast and a mind map. Now one of the things that we've talked about numerous times this year is how much Google's product strategy, I think, is about flexing their lead in multimodal AI. And one could argue that this is one of the bigger flexes to date, especially if you factor it for actual immediate term relevance for real people and real workers. Cinematic video overviews orchestrate the Gemini 3 family of models, Nano Banana Pro and Vio to weave together voiceover images and video in a way that just feels like the beginnings at least of a professional video production. What's more, this is not your grandpa's 10-second video clip. Scoble's video, for example, runs for almost five minutes. Describing the new tech, Google wrote, Gemini now acts as a creative director, making hundreds of structural and stylistic decisions to tell the best story with your sources. It determines the best narrative, visual style and format, and even refines its own work to ensure consistency. Now, at this stage, the only downside is that the feature is exclusive to the top-tier ultra subscription, making me once again grateful that my job justifies holding one of those types of subscriptions for all the major players. Very, very cool stuff from Google, something I'm very excited to play around with more. For now, however, that's going to do it for the headlines. Next up, the main episode.